The Owens Valley

The Owens River of southeast California rises along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at the southeast edge of Yosemite National Park. After flowing eastward through the Long Valley Caldera, the river angles to the south-southeast and begins its journey through the magnificent landscape of the Owens Valley.

The Owens Valley is a geologic graben, a block of crust that dropped between the parallel faults of the Sierra batholith to its west and the White-Inyo fault block mountains to its east; as the mountains rose on either side, this block slipped downward. The floor of the valley has an elevation of 4000 to 3500 feet (north to south) while its steep walls rise toward some of the highest summits in the Lower 48; the latter include Mt. Whitney in the Sierra Nevada (14,498 feet) and White Mountain Peak (14,252 feet) in the White Mountains. The latter range also includes Boundary Peak (13,167 feet), the highest point in Nevada, while the Inyo Mountains, known for their exposure of Cambrian sediments, top out below 12,000 feet.

Representing the southwest edge of the Basin and Range Province, the Owens Valley lies in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada and receives very little moisture from the east due to the high wall of the White and Inyo Mountains. The waters of the Owens River have thus long been diverted for crop production across the Valley and, since 1913, much of its flow has been directed into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, leaving Owens Lake, the natural terminus of the river, mostly dry. Back in the Pleistocene, when mountain glaciers fed the Owens River, its lake basin spilled to the east (around the southern end of the Inyo Range), merging with lakes from other Great Basin rivers to produce an inland sea across Death Valley and adjacent lowlands.